Distribution Miniconf

At FOSDEM we care strongly about open source projects small and large. FOSDEM was created as a meeting place where developers from different projects and with different backgrounds can come together and share ideas, discuss, etc.
The devrooms have always been premier place for this. However, in recent years we have reached the limit of our capacity, with more than double proposals over rooms available. Distributions have always had a strong presence at FOSDEM, however, we were faced with having to choose some distributions over others.

Holding the distro miniconf provides a way to better achieve our goals in two ways:
- by organizing a mini conference where all distributions can participate in, we foster collaboration and cross pollination,
- additionally, some rooms become available for use by other projects, thereby diversifying the audience and topics at FOSDEM.

The idea of the distro miniconf is that rather than having several distributions with their own respective and individual Developer Room, we will host mixed conference rooms where talks and sessions will be organized by topic, with contributors from all distributions attending and participating.

In more detail:

Two (of the largest) devrooms will be allocated for the distro miniconf on both Saturday and Sunday,

sessions will be scheduled by topic (see below)m

every project is welcome to join in :)

Topics are something open for suggestions: whatever you think is appropriate as a topic that is a recurring issue for distributions (governance, feature tracking, trust mechanisms, ambassadors, ...); or something where you would like to present your solutions for specific tasks to other distributions (e.g. package building, translations, bug tracking, community infrastructure, ...). Especially if you're interested in feedback, ideas and collaboration from and with other projects... we'd love to hear about it :).

Here are a few ideas from last year:

Packaging

present different toolsets for handling the burden of packaging a distribution as well as additional repositories (e.g. openSUSE Build Service)

have a few packaging subsystem sessions, where the current state of RPM/yum/zypp/..., dpkg/apt, emerge, ports, etc... are presented, as well as their respective roadmaps for the future

discuss about extending repository metadata formats (such as RPM-MD)

Localization

how to handle collaborative translations ? (e.g. transifex)

localization of distribution documentation, project wikis, etc...

how to coordinate best with upstream ?

Community Infrastructure

FedoraCommunity, opensourced LaunchPad, Bugzilla extensions, etc...

Test and QA

Governance

boards, elections, technical control of the distribution, ...

ambassador programs, LoCo teams, etc...

legal issues

Working with upstream

have a few sessions with major upstream projects present at FOSDEM (such as Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, ...) on how to improve/optimize collaboration between downstream (distributions) and upstream (developers), e.g. for patches